Jacket Potatoes: Boiled, Microwave, Oven and Embers

Step-by-step recipe

1. Jacket potatoes is the everyday name for whole potatoes that are boiled, baked or cooked some other way without peeling first. Most often they are served as a dish on their own, and they are especially good with salted herring and onion. They are a staple of all kinds of salads – herring under a fur coat, Olivier salad – and of gnocchi. They also go into potato dough.
2. Of all the simple, affordable ways to cook potatoes in their skins, the most popular are boiling and baking. Cooking them unpeeled keeps as many nutrients and vitamins as possible. Small potatoes are best: they boil and bake faster and more evenly, and a shorter cooking time means fewer vitamins lost. Don't use potatoes that have turned green – they don't look great and they contain solanine.
3. Boiled jacket potatoes
4. This is the most common method. Boil the potatoes in a small amount of water, so fewer nutrients pass from the potatoes into the liquid. Pick potatoes of roughly the same size. Don't boil damaged or partly rotten ones.
5. Wash the potatoes thoroughly, removing the eyes and any soil. A damaged potato may start falling apart as it boils – save it for soup or frying. Put the potatoes in a pot and cover with cold water. The water should come 2-3 cm above them, no more is needed. You can salt the water: the skin won't let the salt into the potato. Boil the jacket potatoes over medium heat for 15-20 mins.
6. The water shouldn't boil hard, or the outer layer will quickly turn mushy while the inside is still raw. As soon as a thin paring knife goes in easily, the potatoes are done. To make peeling easier, you can douse them with cold water, but they peel quite well even without it.
7. Baking jacket potatoes in the microwave
8. This takes a little more effort, but the potatoes taste much better. Because they bake, they don't soak up water the way boiled potatoes do. You could say they cook in their own juices, from their own moisture. Here too, it's best to bake potatoes of the same size.
9. Wash the potatoes thoroughly and pat dry with a paper towel. For the microwave, pierce each potato with a thin knife. Depending on the size, make 2-4 punctures – not all the way through, but deep and from different sides. Otherwise there's a good chance steam will burst the potatoes as they cook.
10. Every microwave cooks vegetables differently, and the time depends a lot on the amount. For a potato salad I use about 0.5 kg of potatoes, so let's go by that weight. Bake the prepared potatoes at full power for 10 mins, then check with a knife. If you feel resistance, add another 2-3 mins. As a rule, even large potatoes are fully done in 15 mins.
11. Baking jacket potatoes in the oven
12. Baked this way, the potato turns light and slightly crumbly. Wash the potatoes, remove the eyes and pat dry with a paper towel. Prick them with a fork so the steam can escape. Line the baking sheet with foil or use a separate ovenproof glass dish. Bake at 200-220 °C, keeping an eye on them. Cooking time is up to half an hour.
13. If the potatoes aren't going into salads or appetizers, you can brush the skins with a little vegetable oil before baking. Wrapping them in foil also works well. Turn them now and then so they cook evenly and don't burn. By the way, if you washed the potatoes well, you can eat them skin and all – it's delicious.
14. Cooking jacket potatoes in hot embers
15. An old campfire method from my childhood. We simply threw potatoes into the fire, then rolled out the charred potatoes with a stick, broke them open and ate them. Unbelievably tasty, with soot all over our hands and faces. That's a memory from a long time ago.
16. These days it's less romantic. The potatoes go carefully into hot embers for 10-12 mins and then are simply peeled. You can wrap them in foil first. Or lay the potatoes on a grill rack or thread them onto skewers and cook them like kebabs. You'll get wonderfully tasty jacket potatoes – a side for meat or simply a treat.
17. Cooked in fire or embers, the skin hardens and may even char. It's better not to eat it – scoop out the crumbly flesh with a spoon instead. By the way, this shell works very well as a “container” for baking all sorts of fillings, a trick used in many cuisines around the world.